Research & Development

Posted by Adrian Woolard on

I’m Adrian Woolard, head of BBC R&D’s North Lab and BBC Connected Studio. I have a number of responsibilities overseeing two excellent teams of researchers, engineers, producers and innovation experts within BBC R&D and BBC Connected Studio (including BBC Taster).

On 3 November 2015 I had the privilege of giving a presentation at the first Thinking Digital conference to be held in Manchester, to give a whistle-stop tour of our work and approach to "getting stuff done". The conference was a fantastic mix of speakers which helped to further captivate an already highly-engaged audience.

The title of my talk was Building Communities of Innovation, in which I shared an honest and personal account of what we have achieved to date since we moved part of the BBC (including a large part of the Research & Development department) to Salford. These were "tales from the front line".

The main theme of the talk was to highlight the power and value of collaboration in the digital era; the realisation that to have a significant UK and global impact you need to anticipate how you will work with others from the outset. This seems particularly relevant in human-centred innovation. I gave an overview of how we look at depth, scale, agility and insight to drive our initiatives forward and I shared some examples interspersed with a few videos and demonstrations.

I made reference to some key BBC projects and initiatives below with some links if you’d like to find out more about them. There are many others that highlight the breadth of these partnerships.

  • Depth – BBC R&D's network of university partners through Audio Research Partnership and UX Research Partnership.
  • Scale – The Make It Digital initiative and the creation of the BBC micro:bit project, which a number of my team have collaborated on.
  • Agility – Connected Studio launched in 2012 and has become a successful initiative working collaboratively with BBC teams and digital companies across UK and most recently, across Africa in partnership with the World Service.
  • Insight – our public-facing innovation platform, BBC Taster, launched in January this year to allow the BBC to collaborate with external digital agencies in pilot production, and the audience by encouraging licence fee payers to try, rate and share new digital innovations from different areas of BBC, as well as showcasing new talent from across the UK.

I also showcased a number of current projects that highlighted some of our work that focuses on user-centred innovation:

  • A demonstration of future immersive experiences (audio and visual); putting the user as the conductor of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra.
  • A BBC micro:bit cardboard robot built by a couple of members of my research team in their lunch break. We will be publishing the kit and code for this when the BBC micro:bit launches.
  • The Casualty: First Day interactive experience on BBC Taster that was developed by the BBC with digital agency Fish in a Bottle

Finally, 15 members of the audience were asked to participate in a live trial investigating ways of capturing audience reactions, and exploring how we can use the data to inform the live audience, production teams and audiences at home.

At Thinking Digital, audience members were given internet enabled "Love" buttons, which they pressed whenever they saw or heard something during the presentations that resounded strongly with them. The buttons save a timestamp each time they are pressed, and this data can then be synchronised via Bluetooth to a native Android app running on a paired smartphone before an analytics service collates the data. These have previously been trialled with BBC Playlister for Radio. At end of the conference the data was shared back to the audience, and we gained some interesting feedback as to which moments through the conference triggered the most interest or enthusiasm from the audience.

The talk was timely both because of the publication of an independent review of the impact of the overall BBC’s move to North West that cited the innovation impact from BBC to the region, and in relation to the ongoing debate about the BBC’s future vision of its role in the next charter period.

As always I’d like to thank our partners and audience who are helping us build a more open and collaborative BBC, as well as Herb and the Thinking Digital team and my colleagues within BBC R&D and Connected Studio.